Kadokawa has a controlling stake in FromSoftware, who made ‘Armored Core VI’.
In a pretty astonishing piece of news, it seems that Sony is in talks to buy Kadokawa.
According to Reuters, Sony is thinking of buying Kadokawa, which would have massive ramifications for both games and anime.
From a gaming standpoint, the big acquisition would be FromSoftware, of which Kadokawa has a controlling stake as of 2014. Admittedly, Sony already has a small chunk of FromSoftware, along with Tencent, but this new setup would put Sony much more directly in charge.
Considering Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Activision, it makes sense that Sony would go after a company like FromSoftware via Kadokawa.
Sony has had a longstanding relationship with FromSoftware, going back to the 90s and the original PlayStation, so in theory this could be a good match up.
However, my only concern with this is that the Japan Studio at Sony was gutted recently, and the same thing could happen under Sony to FromSoftware. That would obviously be awful.
The other side of this is Kadokawa’s anime and manga output.
Sony already has Crunchyroll and Aniplex, so buying Kadokawa would bring a huge amount of IP across anime and manga under Sony’s roof.
Kadokawa also has a sizeable chunk of the Western anime press, having bought Anime News Network and owning Book Walker, who run GeeXPlus.
In short, this is a lot to take in and would have a dramatic impact across games and anime, not only in Japan but also globally.
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